FORTUNE — One of the members of Investor Village’s AAPL Sanity board — let’s call him David — sent me a link to the data in the attached chart.
“I’ll leave it to the analysts to explain why Apple’s stock went down 8% today,” David wrote on Tuesday, the day after Apple (AAPL) turned in the fourth highest quarterly earnings ever reported.
It was Apple’s fifth $10-billion-plus quarter in three years. Only oil and gas companies make that kind of money, and they haven’t seen $10 billion quarter since 2011.
So what about David’s question? Why did the stock drop 8% Tuesday?
I suspect part of the the answer can be found in the geometry of those five red bars. Apple is reporting record earnings, but Wall Street is looking for earnings growth.
See also: If you wonder why Apple shares go down when sales go up…
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story had the order wrong. Q1 2014 was the fifth biggest quarter of all time, $6 million shy of the previous year’s $14.078 billion.
